I Still Don't Know Where the Pygmy Hippos Came From

I've been intending to say a few words about Cyprus ever since we spent a pleasant couple of weeks there last month. It's a pleasant place--good food, nice people--but not easy to get a handle on. The puzzle starts with the prehistoric stuff--out purpose for going, after all. There clearly were prehistoric settlers on Cyprus--quite a bit by way of physical artifacts. But we know embarrassingly little about just what they mean or how Cyprus relates to the data for surrounding early communities. To take a late example--Bronze Age sources speak of a polity called "Alashiya." For a long time, scholars weren't even sure where Alashiya was. A 2003 publication offers compelling evidence that Alashiya was on Cyprus. But exactly what it was doing there--indeed, exactly where on Cyprus it was--remains pretty much of an open question.

Modern Cyprus has some of the same sort of opacity. In a sense, Cyprus remains now as then in the center of a buzzing turmoil of civilizations. It's divided, of course, between Turks and Greeks. Indeed, perhaps the most striking feature of all is the Nikosia, the divided capital, with its eerie similarity to Jerusalem: Muslims on one side of a fortified boundary, non-Muslims (well: Orthodox Christians) on the other.

But even the Greek-Turk split has an odd kind of unreality. Turkic peoples have been here for centuries; the Turkic military forces moved in during 1974 for no better apparent reason than to prove they can do it. Even then, from a strictly military standpoint, they probably could have rolled over the whole place; they chose not to, it appears, for reasons that have far more to do with world politics than with raw physical force.

Since then it appears that most of the Turk Cypriots (along with a good many of the Greeks) have decamped to London (they had immigration rights). Meanwhile the Turks have replaced them with new immigrants from inland Turkey--immigrants with no reason to care anything about Cyprus per se as distinct from the home country.

Nominally, the new immigrants were settled as farmers. But an added irony is that these days a lot of them cross the border every day into Greek Cyprus because that is where the jobs are. Indeed, the Greeks seem to have made a successful gamble: after the dustup, they bet heavily on tourism, and it seems to have paid off--paid off, that is, if you like living on the lust and greed of barfing British post-adolescents, most of them squirreled away within 300 yards of the beach. These days, you hear Cypriots talk longingly of promoting a better class of tourism. Good luck to them, although it is not easy to imagine how you trump all those yawping young yobboes. Maybe they will have to go back and figure out how the Alashiyans did it. If and when the Greeks can figure out who the hell the Alashiyans were.

Afterthought: I said the shoreline was paved with young Brits. Revise that--for several years now, at least in certain months, the Cyprus shoreline has been a phalanx of wall-to-wall Russians. The Russians aren't there this year, to the great dismay of the tourist providers. And come to think of it, the water isn't there either; two reasons for ongoing anxiety.